Spotify this afternoon announced two more acquisitions in the podcasts market, this time on both the measurement and analytics side of the business. The company is acquiring the podcast measurement service Podsights and the analytics platform Chartable for undisclosed sums.
Measurement and attribution are still two of the biggest, unsolved challenges for podcast advertisers, Spotify explained, which is what it hopes to address with the Podsights acquisition. Initially, Podsights’ technology will be used to help Spotify’s advertisers more accurately measure the impact and actions driven by their podcast ads. Over time, however, Spotify aims to expand the measurement tools to other ad formats, including audio ads within music, video ads and display ads.
Podsights has 40 full-time employees and all will join Spotify as one integrated unit. Spotify says it has no plans to adjust that team at this time.
Chartable, meanwhile, will be another addition to Spotify’s Megaphone, which was recently beefed up with a deal for a comapny called Whooshkaa, which allows radio broadcasters to convert their programming into podcasts. Chartable will integrate its audience insights and its promotional tools, SmartLinks and SmartPromos, with Megaphone so podcasters can learn more about their listener base and grow their business.
After Chartable is fully integrated into Megaphone, Spotify will deprecate the standalone Chartable platform. Until then, however, it will remain available to both new and existing publisher and advertiser clients.
This team is smaller, having only 11 employees, but Spotify isn’t planning to make any immediate changes here, either, it says.
There may be some concern that these previously independent firms will now be in-house at Spotify. But Spotify notes the Podsights team will operate independently from other service functions within Spotify for the foreseeable future in order to maintain trust with its clients, which include podcast brands and agencies.
Spotify’s name has been in the headlines in recent weeks related to its exclusive hosting of Joe Rogan’s podcast, which critics said is helping to spread COVID-19 misinformation. This backlash led several artists, including Neil Young, to pull their music from Spotify’s catalog in protest. But so far, the criticism hasn’t impacted Spotify’s broader plan to invest in podcasts and podcast technology, as it believes the medium has the potential to drive revenue for its business in the longer term.
“We believe we’re still in the early chapters of digital audio and the opportunity for advertising in this space remains significant,” said Dawn Ostroff, chief content & advertising business officer at Spotify, in a statement. “Our acquisitions of podcast technology players Podsights and Chartable are important steps in our pursuit of taking digital audio to the next level, underscoring the powerful impact it delivers for advertisers and publishers, respectively.”
Though Spotify doesn’t tend to immediately disclose the acquisition price for the smaller tech companies it buys, it will often later do so in its SEC filings. For example, Spotify disclosed it acquired the podcast discovery firm Podz, Inc. for €45 million in June 2021 and paid €57 million for Betty Labs, whose tech became Spotify’s live audio platform, Greenroom. Megaphone was one of its larger podcast tech deals at €195 million.
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